Fitness Business School – The Role of Hustle in Business

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about the role hustle plays in business. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

It’s interesting how people get pigeonholed, right? Like I think that as I started to talk about creating your ideal business people, I think wove that in with this concept of lifestyle business that I was really anti hustle and didn’t, really subscribe to maybe this four hour work week type of mentality or something like that and like many things is just plucking one thing out and maybe not seeing the forest for the trees. And the reality is my business journey was. was very much the hustle and grind. And I don’t know that you’d call it rags to riches or whatever else. When I started my first business, I had, few thousand dollars to my name.

And that actually came from selling a little bit of sports memorabilia that I had and had plenty of debt between student loans and car payment didn’t own anything. So my, my net worth was very negative started my first business sharing an apartment with a couple other guys. Then when Holly and I.

Got married. We lived in a basement, right? We shared a house. We lived in a basement. When I say a basement, I don’t mean like this duplex type thing, like no bathroom in the basement. Like you had to go upstairs to, to use the restroom. And our honeymoon was going and painting the gym that was yet staining floors.

I recall very vividly not having enough money when gas prices were high to feel real comfortable driving home and visiting my parents who live like three hours away and not feeling like I had enough money to go buy amusement park tickets for. To take our then family of three to a regional amusement park to like King’s Island.

I’m not talking about like Disney or Universal or something like that. And working, from, before sun up many days to as long as there were people in the gym. And sometimes that, it’s 9, 930 at night. And doing it day after day. And that was just part of it, right?

That was the early stage of this and a separate episode I did about the flywheel effect. That’s very much a very practical look at what my flywheel effect felt like, right? And it was, didn’t have much money to speak of, obviously, and started the first training business.

On a shoestring. And so you make up for it by doing so many things. Bootstrapped manually you’re out networking because you don’t have big marketing budget. You’re following up with people over the phone over and over because you don’t have some sort of tech automations. In place to do it.

You’re selling every opportunity you can because every new client is a big deal. That money in the bank really matters in that moment. And I think that eithout that, then you don’t ever get to the ideal business. And so many people that I talk to they want to have their ideal business without earning their ideal business.

They don’t want to do the work on the front end. They don’t want to do the building. They just want to move in, right? They just want to arrive at that place. And it’s like the keys in hand, walking into their brand new home, this new ideal business. Man it’s something you’ve got to build and in, in hindsight, all of that stuff, it makes for a good story.

I’m very nostalgic about it though. There were plenty of times that it wasn’t all that fun in the moment, you live in a basement and there’s a little bit of water that comes in the basement that obviously creates some problems. I also think that’s part of what allowed me to be a better coach.

Because, I didn’t have a big financial backer. I didn’t have a trust fund to lean on or a bunch of money put back or wealthy parents that were just gonna finance everything that, it was all very much you earn it to pay for it in the moment. And and I think that. That’s probably allowed me to empathize with business owners at the same spot.

But it also has been very much a tool in my toolbox to be able to show people how to go and generate a lot out of a little. And I think that. It’s certainly made me more valuable to a big subset of the clients that I’ve served, but I think more importantly it’s helped me to remind the people that I coach, I don’t care if it’s youth baseball players or the fitness clients that I’ve coached along the way, or the business owners that the results are a product of what you do, not what you say, not what you wish would happen.

You’re not entitled to just arriving at those outcomes. You have to do some work. And in the beginning the rewards probably are not as immediate or as grand as you hope. But if you’re willing to stay in the course, that’s the foundation of all the bigger things that you’re going to have. So if you’re at that stage.

Lean into it. Know that if you stay in the course and you persevere and you focus on the fundamentals and don’t get caught up chasing shiny objects, that the work will compound and the momentum will come. But momentum comes from the work that you do. You don’t get momentum. And then that is what creates the work.

It’s just not how things happen. I would say very much that I am not a hustle in perpetuity type of guy. I think that if you’re five or 10 years into business and you are still behaving like a startup, either that’s a choice or you’re doing it wrong, right? Like you, you decided, Hey, I really like this.

This is the lifestyle I want to have. This is. The things that are fulfilling to me and if that’s you, who am I to tell you different, right? I’m telling you to create your ideal business. Your ideal is your ideal. Not necessarily mine, But if you are behaving like a startup because you’ve not installed systems and You’ve not delegated and elevated and continue to evolve the way that you Do things then again, that’s a choice that’s you saying, look, you know what?

I have just said, I’m going to be a person who builds my business on hustle forever and I’ll accept the sacrifices and the limitations that come with that and that, that probably means spending a bunch of hours, just like I, and most every other business owner that I. That I know went into it.

There’s so many of us that, you’re working, 16, 18 hours a day for four months at a time to build, but it’s fun because this is new and novel and exciting. And you’re a pioneer in your own world, doing things that maybe you hadn’t done before. At least that was my experience.

And that was the experience I had as a baseball coach too. And, but I don’t think for me that would have been sustainable. I, my priorities evolved with kids and and I wanted to have time to spend with them, so that was the origin of this whole concept of creating your ideal business, the hustle came first the work, the setting the foundation the.

The commitment to, creating the right systems and optimizing them to hiring the right people to, to building a brand, if you will, where, you’ve got connections in the marketplace you go out and try to build a reputation by doing good work. All that stuff is a lot of work in the beginning, but then eventually It starts to, to create that flywheel effect and you have that momentum later on.

So if if you were somebody very much in The Gary Vanderchuck kind of school of, Hey, I’m just going to hustle and barely know my kid’s names that’s up to you. And if you’re on the flip side and the whole lifestyle business is what you want, I would just caution you that I’ve yet to meet anybody who just got to have that ideal business, that lifestyle business, that four hour work week, or even four hour work day without earning it on the front end. So you’re going to hustle at some point, how long you hustle is entirely your choice.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get
you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.